Nine times out of ten, when an author is out promoting her new book, she is already hard at work on the next one. Today's guest blogger, author Holly Chamberlin is no exception. Her current book THE FAMILY BEACH HOUSE is in stores now and will be a wonderful addition to your summer reading. But in today's post, Holly talks about what's on her mind now and gives us a rare insider look into her next book, SUMMER FRIENDS, due out next July.
Two women reunite after twenty years of lapsed friendship in SUMMER FRIENDS, the book I’m working on now. Maggie suggests the reunion and Delphine, for reasons she can barely express, is reluctant to reconnect. But Maggie, feeling that her life has become lonely and joyless, is persistent in her pursuit of the one person who always made her happy. Delphine was born and raised in Ogunquit, Maine, and she returned after college to run her family’s farm. Over the course of an Ogunquit summer, the two women struggle to understand what went wrong or who was to blame for the collapse of their once-vital friendship. Ultimately, Maggie and Delphine must evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of the relationship in the present and make a decision that will strongly affect their future to either revitalize their friendship or to let it pass entirely.
Writing this book has, inevitably, plunged me into a review of my own friendships with women through the years. For example, I remember a few times when, in the interest of self-preservation, I made a conscious decision to retreat from a particular friend. I also remember a few cases in which sheer laziness was to blame for the disintegration of an otherwise healthy friendship. And I wish I could forget the one awful occasion upon which I was effectively shunned by someone I thought a friend. This was my first encounter with a ‘mean girl’ and her cohorts and it was truly upsetting. How, it made me wonder, do young girls survive bullying by other, more popular girls if a forty-seven year old woman can be so disconcerted by bad behavior?
I will be writing a reading group guide for this book, of course, and I think that Maggie and Delphine’s story will inspire lively discussions about the nature of women’s friendships – about how they change and grow or wither over time; about friendships between women of different generations; about friendships between women of the same age but vastly different experiences. For example, in my own life I am a friend to two women my own age, one of who has a twenty-five year old son, the other of who has a ten-year old daughter. I have no children, yet I’m vastly enriched by my relationships with Julia and Ruth, as I am by my relationships with Kit and Carrie, who are of an age with my mother. Some of my friends are single; I’m married. Some of them are gay; I’m not. One of them was a stand-up comedian; I love to laugh. Two friends are painters; painting is my favorite of the visual arts. One friend, who is a marvelous cook, kept me fed during my single years in New York. Today, though I see her only once every year or so, she still keeps me emotionally fed through her emails and phone calls. A grammar school friend who I haven’t seen or heard about in close to forty years regularly appears in my dreams as a current buddy. Clearly, the emotional impression she made on my life was a deep one, and yet, oddly, I have no interest in tracking her down via Facebook or a search engine.
Friendships must be mutually beneficial to be healthy, and I often wonder, as do the main characters in SUMMER FRIENDS, what it is that I offer a particular friend. This is harder to determine; it requires stepping back from the friendship and giving it a long, hard, look. What, I wonder, am I contributing to the life of this person who does so much for me, or who seems so self-sufficient, or who has so much talent or career success that I don’t? Such reflection is usually quite illuminating – and sometimes kind of scary.
I’m really looking forward to hearing from readers about their experience with this book (due for publication in 2011) and about how it might or might not reflect the truth about their own friendships. In particular, I hope to hear about those friendships that have withstood the test of time and divergent lifestyles, a major theme explored in SUMMER FRIENDS.
We choose our friends and they choose us. The responsibility here, to ourselves and to our chosen ones, is enormous.
-- Holly Chamberlin, Author
